Leading New York Law Firms Lag in Including Women and Minorities

Large New York City law firms, the economic engine of the $1 billion-plus legal industry, have made scant progress on including women and minorities in their ranks, according to a confidential survey by the New York City Bar Association.

“Progress remains incremental,” John S. Kiernan, the president of the association, said of the survey, “and attrition and pipeline numbers are not where they should be.”

The law firms, mostly those with 51 to 500 or more lawyers, were required by the association for the first time this year to complete a benchmarking survey to give a better picture of law firm composition. For the first time, the survey collected the breakdown in lawyers by gender and ethnicity rather than by the term “minority attorney.”

Seventy-five firms — around 70 percent of the signatories who committed to the bar’s statement of diversity principles — responded to the survey. That was up from 55 firms who replied last year.

The firms are noteworthy because they are among the nation’s most profitable, generating tens of millions of dollars in revenue from complex legal matters involving the country’s biggest corporations. The data was aggregated, so no specific firms were named, but signers include august firms like Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, Kirkland & Ellis, and Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz.

According to the 2015 Diversity Benchmarking Report, women make up 19 percent of such firms’ partners, a slight increase over the previous year and a high over all since the survey began in 2004.

But there were fewer women working as associates — junior lawyers who seek to rise through the ranks to become partners. And minority women make up only 15 percent of all female partners at signatory firms, and less than 3 percent partners over all.

Minorities over all had flat representation even as a growing number of large firms have hired diversity directors to recruit and vet a wider array of candidates. Last week, three major firms — Reed Smith, Hogan Lovells and Day Pitney — announced they had each hired top diversity staff.

Even so, firm partnerships over all remain more than 75 percent white male, with women far behind at less than 20 percent and minorities at slightly over 5 percent, according to figures from the National Association for Law Placement, which tracks legal industry statistics.

Although the New York City Bar Association survey did not attach findings to specific law firms, Mr. Kiernan, who is a partner at the Debevoise & Plimpton, noted that the survey was the most detailed to date. Firms that did not respond to the mandatory survey could be struck from the signatory list as a means of underscoring the importance the bar association attaches to diversity.

The survey findings concluded that progress for women and minorities is hampered by high rates of lawyers leaving firms for varied reasons. Failure to attain equity, or owner, partnership — or the lack of prospects to become partner — appeared to have a significant effect on firm longevity. Salaried, or income, partners who were women or minorities had a turnover rate of 8.6 percent — double that of male equity partners, who left at a rate of 3.2 percent, according to the survey.

Female lawyers have made progress in moving up to firm leadership positions — meaning they are on firm management committees or are practice group heads — and a handful, like Faiza Saeed at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, have risen through the ranks to lead the firm. But the survey found that among top firms, 25 percent do not have a woman on their management committees, and one in eight lacks a woman practice group leader.

And while white women made advances in the law firm structure, minority women held only 3 percent of firm partnerships.

Among minorities, the percentage remained static, though the survey found that slightly more African-American lawyers had positions on management committees, were practice group heads or were special counsels to a firm. Even so, most firms lack minorities on their management committees, and more than a third have no racial or ethnic minorities serving as heads of practice groups, such as bankruptcy and litigation.

Mr. Kiernan said the pipeline to firm leadership was being eroded by the number of lawyers voluntarily leaving firms. Last year, just under 13 percent of white male lawyers left firms, compared with 18.4 percent of women and 20.8 percent of minorities.

“What you see is real progress, but lower than we’d like,” Mr. Kiernan said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A3 of the New York edition with the headline: Leading New York Law Firms Lag on Diversity, Survey Says. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe